That doesn't prevent the problem of length limits encouraging users to break their programs into networks of smaller programs communicating over pipes. I'm sure that sort of thing can be done well, but it certainly takes discipline.

Particularly as programs start out simple and organically grow, once they start hitting length limits, they're going to start evolving into locally-distributed computation. Maybe you get something nice like composable small unix-like utilities. However, I suspect there's a large overlap between the set of developers who would do that well and the set of developers who would still keep things nice and modular within a single process if they didn't have size limits.